Thursday, May 12, 2016

Transform the way you follow up with over due recare patients

I learned the coolest thing today! Actually, I am rethinking
the way I run the Continuing Care report. I know, right? If you have been
reading my blog over the years, I talk a lot about the four reports to keepyour schedule full — ASAP List, Unscheduled List, Continuing Care List and
Treatment Manager Report. Today, while I was working with a team on their
hygiene workflow, we discovered something together that could completely
transform the conversations you have with your hygiene patients when you are
making follow-up calls.

As oral health clinicians, it is our fiduciary
responsibility to inform patients of oral disease or infection so they can make
educated decisions about their health and schedule them for their preventative
maintenance visit. This education and communication with the patient is a full
team responsibility, not just the clinical team. The front office team becomes
part of the equation whenever patients are balking at scheduling their next
visit or if they are following up with overdue patients.

The front office team does not need to know every clinical
detail about the hygiene visit. However, having one little nugget of
information to reiterate the value for the patient to schedule the recare visit
can be critical. In previous versions of Dentrix, I would teach my front office
teams to read through the clinical note from the hygienist and find something
in there that would build value for the patient like “watching pocket #3,”
“needs to floss more in lower anterior,” or “check margins on crown #30.” What
happens a lot of the time is the front office team either doesn’t like going
into the patient chart or these notes are still being written in a paper chart.

So where can the front office team build their own arsenal
of “value added notes” so when they call the overdue hygiene patient, they can
say something like, “You know, Sally really needed to see you in four months so
she can check how the bleeding has improved in the upper right area” and the
patient will say, “Oh yeah. That’s right. She did want to check that.” The
motivational note in the patient’s continuing care is a perfect spot . . . and
now it shows up on an awesome report.

If you are on Dentrix G6, you have a new amazing feature
called List Manager. It’s like doing a Patient Reports by Filter … only on
steroids. This List Manager will also allow you to put your Perio and Prophy
patients on the same list . . . Whoo Hoo!

Watch the video below and see how to
create a new kind of list.

Dayna Johnson, Certified Dentrix Trainer

Dayna loves her work. She has over 25 years of experience in the dental industry, and she’s passionate about building efficient, consistent, and secure practice management systems. Dayna knows that your entire day revolves around your practice management software—the better you learn to use it, the more productive and stress-free your office will be. In 2016, Dayna founded Novonee ™, The Premier Dentrix Community, to help cultivate Dentrix super-users all over the country. Learn more from Dayna at www.novonee.com and contact Dayna at dayna@novonee.com.